Program Notes

SATURDAY EVENING, MAY 23 1953

By Lawrence Morton

This program presents music of two generations of “modern” composers. Prokofieff (born 1891) and Hindemith (born 1895) represent the older generation which, in its yeasty youth, started an indecorous ferment throughout the musical world. It lasted through the nineteen-twenties. In the course of a natural maturation, however, this generation consolidated its discoveries and reconciled them with the musical traditions of the past. By the middle ‘thirties its leaders had become respected elder statesmen, founders of “schools”, instructors of youth. They have bred no radicals but solidly trained young composers like Lukas Foss (born 1922) and Wallace Berry (born 1929). This newer generation is less spectacular than its sires had been in their youth. It has not staged the demonstrations or issued the manifestos and calls-to-arms that marked the ‘twenties. On the whole it is a more thoughtful generation. Its search has been for expressiveness in music, whereas the search of its predecessors had been for the materials of music. 

The Classical Symphony is a kind of “sport” in the context of Prokofieff’s work during the ‘teens of this century. This was the period when he was producing such “modernistic” pieces as the Sarcasms for piano, the Scythian Suite, Chout, and The Gambler. These had been roundly denounced by the conservatives as the work of an unprincipled and unlettered crackpot. The Classical Symphony was an answer to the critics, a demonstration that the composer was thoroughly grounded in the principles of classical art. It was a symphony written “as Haydn would have written it had he lived in our day.” Nothing in it is more Haydnish than its wit and irony. Yet it was these very qualities that led some commentators to call it a parody, a burlesque — clear proof that they didn’t know their Haydn. It is genuinely classic. There is nothing in it so subversive of classical procedures as, for instance, Mozart’s introduction of brand new thematic material into the recapitulation of a sonata movement, or Haydn’s use of a waltz as a closing theme for a symphonic movement of unusual gravity. In matters of key relationship, which is the very touchstone of classical sonata forms, Prokofieff is positively orthodox. He never again composed an apologia like this one. But classical principles always remained an element of his musical personality. 

Of Hindemith’s music we hear a mature work, written in 1940. A feature of his maturity is his reconciliation of a thoroughly modern tonal system, which honors the triad, with a thoroughly traditional attitude toward formal organization. That is, he writes exceedingly dissonant music in the old forms (variation, fugue, sonata, toccata, etc.). It has been pointed out that he has a strong medievalizing tendency, which is manifested not only in his musical style but also in his interest in such historical figures as St. Francis and Matthias Gruenewald. In his recent book, A Composer’s World, he locates the philosophical basis of his art in the writings of St. Augustine and Boethius. One must be careful not to exaggerate the importance of these extra-musical details: it is no more than interesting that the title of the present set of variations should refer to the ancient physiological idea that the state of the body was determined by the relative proportions of the four elements — dry, moist, hot, and cold: phlegm, blood, yellow bile, black bile: phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric, melancholic. 

Though this medical notion is so outdated that it cannot account even for the common cold, its metaphorical translation into music has positive therapeutic values: it gives fresh vitality to the variation principle. Hindemith’s procedure here is to set up a very large tripartite theme. The first part, in the common A-B-A form, is announced by the strings alone in a moderate tempo. The second part might be thought of as a sonatina, since it has two main ideas and some subsidiary matter, all of it is recapitulated; the tempo is quick and the piano carries the burden of the music. The third part is in the 6/8 siciliano tempo that Hindemith employs frequently in slow movements; its pattern is A-A-B-A; it begins with a solo string quartet, and the piano appears only to trill some embellishments during the repetition of the first A section. Though the character of each variation changes according to its title, the tripartite structure of the theme is maintained consistently. The divisions in each variation are marked by pronounced tempo changes, except in the Sanguine variation which is in waltz time throughout. 

In addition to this architectural feature there is another constant that holds through the whole work — the sequence of notes which compose the three themes. I say sequence because the duration of any single note as well as the rhythm and meter of the whole melody are subject to alteration. It is hardly likely that any listener will recognize the theme in its many transformations. But this is to be regarded neither as a shortcoming in the listener nor as a weakness in the composer. If Hindemith had wanted you to recognize the theme, he would have made it always recognizable. What he wants you to hear is the diversity possible with thematic unity. It is the job of the analyst to discover the unity in apparent diversity and to report it to his readers, who should be much comforted by the assurance that the theme is always where it ought to be. 

Wallace Berry’s Canticle on a Judaic Text, in spite of its title, is not a liturgical work. It expresses, the composer writes, “my admiration of a people who, through ages of extremes persecution, have managed to hold fast to their dreams of ultimate freedom from all injustice. My work is meant as a tribute to the Jewish people, although I do not separate them from all other peoples who strive to achieve lives utterly free of the oppressive and ominous specters of war and want and of all forms of tyranny. The Jewish desire for a permanent homeland is a part of those dreams; and the establishment of Israel is certainly only an imperfect part of their realization.”

Berry’s text is a dramatic narrative — dramatic in the sense that it enumerates a series of events or emotional states: the suffering of the oppressed; their lamentations; the taunts of the oppressors; God’s judgment upon the oppressors; God’s promise of peace; the prophecy of redemption for Israel; the remembrance of God’s pledge to Abraham; the prophecy of Israel’s return to Jerusalem in a time of peace, joy and fruitfulness. 

There is no formal musical pattern in the Canticle. Themes recur from time to time, though not because they illustrate any verbal or pictorial ideas. The music is descriptive only in the general sense that all vocal music is descriptive. This is only to say that the key to the Canticle is in the text, and that the form of the music is identical with the dramatic structure of the narrative. 

Lukas Foss’ A Parable of Death was commissioned by the Louisville Philharmonic Society and had its first performance by the Louisville Orchestra last March. The commission specified a work with a narrator as a soloist. This specification presented some knotty problems — the choice of an appropriate text, the relationship of the spoken word to music, the maintenance of musical integrity, the avoidance of theatrical elements, and the age-old problem of putting words and music together without sacrificing the legitimate claims of either. Consideration of these problems led Foss to reject the idea of a great monologue surrounded with emotive, illustrative music. Instead, he turned to a simple story told by the German poet Rilke. And he turned to Bach for a clue to the solution of the problem of the narrative with music. “Let us marvel at Bach’s insight into the nature of story-telling in music,” Foss wrote. “He avoided suffocating the story with an undue amount of music; he presented his story in the form of a simple and lucid recitative which is woven, threadlike, through the oratorio. But he gave the bulk of the musical substance to interruptions of the story, interpolations in the shape of arias, duets, chorales. Thus he discarded drama on the theater level and gave us instead drama in the realm of pure music.

“My narrative,” Foss continues, “is taken from the Geschichte vom lieben Gott by Rainer Maria Rilke. The narrator tells quietly and intimately what appears to be an old legend about a man, a woman, and death. Chorus and solo tenor comment on the story. Their lines are taken from poems by the same author. It was my task to put story and poems together so that the whole world would make the kind of text I needed for my specific undertaking.”

Having subtracted in the above quotation many of the words the composer wrote about his work, I have hardly the temerity to add words of my own. I should like to point out, however, that there is some thematic connection between the movements. The orchestral figures accompanying the chorale, section 3, are subsequently developed in 3B. Conversely, an orchestral figure of section 4 appears as the figuration surrounding the chorale of section 4B. The theme which is the subject of the Invention, section 5, is foreshadowed in both 4 and 4B. And section 7 recalls various musical ideas from the whole work. 

Saturday Afternoon Program Notes

May 22, 1965 

By CARL CUNNINGHAM

In contrast with our interest in our European heritage, we too often neglect those Americans who stimulated the growth of modern music on our own soil. The composers represented on this program fall into two categories: those who pioneered in adapting European compositional techniques to the expression of American musical ideas, and those who either broke with European tradition or prefigured it in finding new technical means of expressing those ideas. 

Ruth Crawford (1901-1953) was born in Ohio and received her education and early experience as a composer in Chicago. Her husband, Charles Seeger, was largely responsible for her acquaintance with American traditional music, beginning around 1930. As to the String Quartet, its outstanding innovation lies in its third movement, a mass of sound that anticipates the advanced music of Ligeti and Maderna in its total dependence upon the elements of dynamics and instrumental tone color. As described by Seeger, the movement is “. . . an experiment in dynamic counterpoint. Each part has a different alternation of crescendo and diminuendo, or else the same alternation, but beginning at different times.”

The Stabat Mater of Virgil Thomson also avoids all traditional devices of form and simply progresses from beginning to end. It proves that “innovation is not synonymous with complexity.” The text is by Max Jacob, and the voices of an angel, Mary, Jesus, and St. John are all represented in the soprano line.

John Cage writes of his sonatas: “I have decided to attempt the expression in music of the ‘permanent emotions’ of Indian tradition: the heroic, the erotic, the wondrous, the mirthful, sorrow, fear, anger, the odious, and their common tendency toward tranquility.”

Henry Cowell invented the “tone cluster,” and both Béla Bartók and Alban Berg requested his permission to use the device in their own music. The first of Cowell’s pieces is drawn from Irish mythology, the second is a rearrangement of his Aeolian Harp, and the last “a satire on repetitious advertising of a raucous nature.”

Aaron Copland, Adolph Weiss, and Wallingford Riegger all received training abroad, Weiss being one of Schoenberg’s first American pupils. Unlike the eight separate and contrasting sections of the Riegger variations, Copland’s Piano Variations consist of a single cumulative movement, without sharply defined divisions. The songs of Weiss are intimately expressive pieces, contrapuntal in their nature. 

George Tremblay, also a Schoenberg student, has adapted the twelve-tone discipline to the idiom of American jazz in the Prelude and Dance. The first of these pieces is in the spirit of a ballad, while the second is a quick movement, full of vigorous rhythms. 

Naturally, this concert could not end without a tribute to the earliest of these pioneers, Charles Ives. In its biting individuality and its bold anticipation of standard twentieth-century musical idioms, Ives’ music stands apart from anything yet produced by American composers. Yet the real value of this music rests not in these elements, but its expressive power and intrinsic beauty. 

PROGRAM NOTES FOR FRIDAY EVENING by James Reid

June 1, 1973 at 9:00 pm

The great J.S. Bach may himself have originated the idea of composition for multiple keyboards. The impetus for such compositions may well have come from several sources. In 1729, Bach assumed the directorship of Leipzig’s COLLEGIUM MUSICUM, a student-professional performing organization founded by Telemann in 1701. The collegium expected its illustrious director to perform and to compose for its occasional gatherings at popular Leipzig and testify to his lively interest in the Collegium. He probably wrote the sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Karl Philipp Emanuel. Bach was doubtless attracted by the wealth of possibilities for elaborate inter-play and increased sonority, offered by several keyboards.

The Concerto for Four Keyboards in a Minor (BWV 1065), written around 1730-33, is a transcription of the Vivaldi Concerto for Four Violins in B Minor (Op. 3 No. 10). Bach’s transcription fully retains the elemental thematic invention of the original while it neatly transfers Vivaldi’s ideas into the new medium. With typical skill, Bach realizes the implied harmonies of Vivaldi’s original and recasts the violinistic figurations for keyboards. The dynamic outer movements achieve a Bachian scope in the new medium. The central slow movement transforms the violin arpeggios of the original into powerful block chords for the four keyboards. After Bach, composers rarely turned to the multiple keyboard format. Most composers probably feared to tread the thin line between multi-part independence and over-written clutter and clatter. Only Mozart’s Concertos for Two and Three keyboards (K. 365 and K. 242) approach Bach’s models in clarity and cohesion. In the nineteenth century, the English sometimes staged multiple keyboard extravaganzas a phenomenon revived in the “monster” concerts of the present century. Twentieth century composers have turned to multiple keyboards for the many possibilities they offer for elaborate musical inter-play. 

Four Organs with Percussion: Steve Reich

Steve Reich’s Four Organs arrives at a different utilization of the multiple keyboard medium. He provides the following description of the work: Four Organs was composed in January 1970. It begins with a short pulsing chord which gradually gets longer and longer in duration. As the chord stretches out, slowly resolving and unresolving, a sort of slow-motion music is created. The maracas lay down a steady time grid of even eighth notes throughout, enabling the performers to play together while mentally counting up to as much as 200 beats and more on a given cycle of sustained tones. Four Organs is an example of music that is a “gradual process”. By that term I do not mean the process of composition, but rather pieces of music that they determine all the note to note (sound to sound) details and the overall form simultaneously. (Think of a round or infinite canon.) I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music. To facilitate closely detailed listening a musical process should happen extremely gradually. 

Performing and listening to a gradual musical process resembles:

pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come to rest; turning over an hourglass and watching the sand slowly run through to the bottom; placing your feet in the sand by the ocean’s edge and watching, feeling, and listening to the waves gradually bury them. 

Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also a kind of complete control as going together. By “a kind” of complete control I mean that by running this material through this process I completely control all that results, but also that I accept all that results without changes. 

Three Dances for Two Amplified Prepared Pianos: John Cage

John Cage well illustrates the possibilities for inter-play in his Three Dances for Two Amplified Prepares Pianos (1944-45). All three Dances utilize rapid ostinato-like patterns in widely varying rhythmic displacements. Cage achieves a dense web of sound.

The prepared piano is something of a Cage trademark. The composer directs the performers to “prepare” the piano with a wide array of nuts, bolts, screws, rubber, felt strips, pennies, and lengths of plastic. These materials are inserted between the piano strings in carefully specified positions. The alteration completely change the timbre of the instruments: the bolts and screws yield two or three simultaneous string harmonics, while the rubber and felt produce a damped sound. 

The Dances present extreme rhythmic difficulties for the soloists, who must execute complicated inter-locking rhythmic patterns at top speed without reference to the accustomed keyboard pitches. Each of the Dances has the character of a perpetuum mobile, with frequent displacements of rhythmic accents across the bar line. Though some scalar and rhythmic patterns recur from time to time, the Dances do not adhere to any clear traditional forms. They are a virtuoso demonstration of the possibilities of Cage’s aural world. 

The Concerto for Two Keyboards in C Major (BWV 1061) dates from ca. 1730. It is one of the few concertos not based upon an earlier model, but apparently conceived at the outset for two keyboards. Here the composer strives to intensify the polyphonic density of the solo parts while making them more powerful in relation to the accompanying instruments. The accompanying tutti is reduced to a bare minimum, and the interest of the work lies almost entirely in the elaborate solo parts. The powerful and energetic first movement begins to suggest the rudiments of sonata form in its contrast between the impetuous first solo and a more nearly lyrical “second theme.” The Siciliano second movement dispenses entirely with the orchestral accompaniment. This intimate slow movement unfolds as a concise four-part composition with frequent canonic imitation. The Finale returns to the mood of the first movement. Bach sets the Finale as a fugue, its subject presented by the two keyboards in turn and then elaborated by the two together. 

Program Notes for Friday Evening

June 4, 1982

STRAVINSKY: Octet

“The Octuor began,” Stravinsky wrote in a reply to Robert Craft’s question, “with a dream in which I saw myself in a small room surrounded by a small group of instrumentalists playing some very attractive music. I did not recognize the music, though I strained to hear it, and I could not recall any feature of it the next day, but I do remember my curiosity — in the dream — to know how many the musicians were. I remember too that after I had counted them to the number eight, I looked again and saw that they were playing bassoons, trombones, trumpets, a flute, and a clarinet. I awoke from this little concert in a state of great delight and anticipation and the next morning began to compose the Octuor; which I had no thought of the day before, though for some time I had wanted to write an ensemble piece — not incidental music like the Histoire du soldat, but an instrumental sonata.”

This was the first time, since the early days of his tutelage under Rimsky-Koraskov, that Stravinsky undertook a work in strict sonata form. It begins with a slow introduction and moves on to a lively allegro; the slow movement is a set of variations, ending with a fugato; and the finale is a rondo. All cut and dried, one might say — excepting the wit, which is Haydn’s; the counterpoint, which is Bach’s (“his two-part Inventions were somewhere in the remote back of my mind”); and the sonority and rhythm and the choice of notes, which are strictly Stravinskian. His view of classicism is somewhat analogous to Cézanne’s cubistic view of landscapes, Picasso’s view of the human figure simultaneously in facade and profile, Paul Klee’s linear depiction of space, T.S. Eliot’s metaphoric allusions to the historic materials of poetry, perhaps even Freud’s view of the adult personality through the prism of infancy. This view is not one of sentiment but, rather, of a mental attitude; its agent (except with Freud!) is wit. This is one of the most amusing pieces in the Stravinsky repertoire. 

I hope you did not have to wait for the final 27 measures to realize how much an American “pop” rhythm, the “Charleston,” figures in the composition. It is not ubiquitous but it is frequent. An influence? Well, hardly: Stravinsky began composing the Octuor in the autumn of 1922, completing it in the spring of 1923. The Broadway hit, Runnin’ Wild, which made the Charleston famous, was also produced in 1923 but, alas!, just too late to be an “influence.”

MOZART: March from The Magic Flute 

The March, from the Finale of the second act, is only one of the many sublimities in that puzzling and enchanting work. Our scene is one of the sublime moments; but one must remember that with both Papageno and Sarastro in the cast of characters — the one in a comic role, the other very serious — The Magic Flute is hardly less than Shakespearian. Emanuel Schikaneder, the librettist, counted on its success because it had a fairy-tale plot and elaborate stage machinery; they also matter. But it is Mozart’s music that welds all the improbabilities into concord.   

The March is the scene where Tamino and Pamina undergo the tests by fire and by waterfall. Pamina tells him to play his flute, which was her father’s, as the young lovers enter upon their dangerous path. Accompanied by brass and drums, the magic flute plays a slow march. This is the last of the trials to prove their love for one another.

(Midway in their passage, the lovers have a brief vocal duet: “May your music protect us in the waterfall, just as it did through the fire.” The duet is doubled by bassoon and oboe, note by note, exactly; and since we do not have any vocalists on this program, we leave it to the bassoon and oboe to carry the burden.)

STARZER and GLUCK: Divertimento

When the Divertimento was played here at the 1954 Ojai Festival, it was presented as a work by Mozart, K. 187. Now it turns out that it isn’t by Mozart at all, but by Josef Starzer and Christoph Willibald Gluck. Starzer was the leader of the Imperial Chapel in Vienna and left that position to become the court composer in St. Petersburg; after ten years he returned to Vienna where he was very popular as a composer of ballet music. Gluck was a world traveler in his early years, producing his operas in London and Copenhagen, Prague, and throughout Italy before settling down in Vienna about 1752; his Paris years were later. I do not know how Starzer and Gluck were brought together to compose this little piece, but it probably was to celebrate an occasion at one of the very popular Riding Schools — and it might even have been (as Einstein surmises in respect to K. 187) for the Archbishop of Salzburg’s inauguration. There were originally ten numbers in the Divertimento, but Nos. 6 and 8 appear to have been lost. As the work now stands (we perform it just as we did in 1954) Nos. 1 to 5 were composed by Starzer; No. 6 is anonymous, and Nos. 7 and 8 by Gluck. There is, by the way, another Divertimento, K. 240, for the same instrumentation that seems to be by Mozart. That is probably why Köchel himself, and Waldersee and Einstein, both of them editors of the later editions of Köchel, attributed K. 187 to Mozart.

HAYDN: Divertimento in B-flat

This is the piece that Brahms borrowed for his Haydn Variations, Opus 56, and wrought upon it such contrapuntal wonders as to make him surely one of the greatest contrapuntists since Bach. It was the slow movement, “Chorale St. Antonii,” that he took as his theme, a tune of such spaciousness and beauty that St. Anthony, he of the Temptations, could not possibly have been Haydn’s subject. Not only the slow movement but the whole piece is a happy one, with only a touch of stress in the G minor variation of the last movement — which, by the way, includes some disguised but still transparent references to the chorale. 

For his wind-bands and marches, Haydn used to bring in an odd-looking instrument called the serpent, which looks like what it is, a double-S. Its original purpose was to support church choirs, especially in Gregorian plainsong. Serpents were used well into the middle of the nineteenth century and were regularly employed in military bands, the use to which Haydn assigned it as a bass instrument. 

It was once thought that the Divertimento was the work of one of Haydn’s pupils, Ignaz Joseph Pleyel, who later became a manufacturer of pianos in Paris. But it now appears (I do not say “is”) that Haydn is the composer. 

GABRIELI: Canzone

The great school of Venetian composers was not unlike the first half of our present century. Like the words of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, these were times of innovation, marking the end of Renaissance and the beginnings of the Baroque era. Monteverdi was of course the great genius of the time; but among his predecessors were the two Gabrielis, Andrea and Giovanni, uncle and nephew, who “consolidated the character of the Venetian school.” Composers from all over Europe came to study with them (including Schüetz), and the Venetian style became an international one for practically the whole continent. It was a period of great civic and religious celebrations, and the festivities were centered upon such things as the battle of Lepanto (1571) and the story of the Nativity. 

Giovanni Gabrieli composed both secular and religious music, as did most of the composers of his time. His collection of large antiphonal pieces for opposing choirs was typified by the present selection of Canzone No. 10, for ten instruments in two choirs. Following a suggestion made in the preface to his complete works, this performance doubles the instruments in the woodwind choir in order to balance the instruments of the brass choir; for present day instruments are far different from those of Gabrieli’s day. 

This work is dedicated to the brothers Georg, Anton, Philipp, and Albert Fugger, of the great banking family of Augsberg, who were both patrons and friends of both Gabrielis. 

STRAVINSKY: Symphonies of Wind Instruments

The term Symphonies as used in the title of this work has nothing to do with the term symphony as we normally use it. Stravinsky here uses the term in its root meaning — a harmony of sounds; and when he employs the plural form, he means that his composition is made up of a number of such harmonies of sounds. In his autobiography he called the work “a ritual which is unfolded in terms of short litanies between different groups of homogeneous instruments.”

The Symphonies originated in a small piano piece in chorale style that Stravinsky composed for a Debussy-memorial issue of the French magazine, La Revue musicale. It now remains here as a coda. The whole work was completed in June-July 1920 and dedicated to the memory of Debussy. 

The music begins with a motif in the high register of the clarinets, immediately answered by soft, dissonant chords in the full band derived from the original chorale. In quick succession, two Russian popular songs, one by the flute, the other by the bassoon. A comparatively long pastoral section for solo woodwinds, also somewhat Russian in character; and previous motifs recur. A rapid, savage dance movement. Then the original chorale. All of these ideas reappear in various forms and colors at various points throughout the work. The first pair, especially, functions almost as a ritornello binding the sections together. 

The structure is indeed a matter of great interest, for the music seems continuously to be looking back at itself while it moves forward. Its unique qualities are its melodiousness and its sonority. “The final impression,” writes Eric Walter White, “is one of sombre brazen mathematical splendor, in which the various episodes are framed by a strange clangor as of bells.” By “mathematical” White refers only to the relationships between the tempos of the various sections — in short, the proportional system of renaissance and medieval periods. Otherwise the Symphonies have the spontaneity of inspired, almost improvised, music. 

STRAVINSKY: Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments

The Concerto is from Stravinsky’s so-called “back to Bach” period, which differs only in name from analogous periods in the creative lives of many other composers. Stravinsky has always been enormously acquisitive and his continuous absorption of the past has always resulted in new discoveries. Thus he absorbed Pergolesi, Tchaikovsky, American Jazz, et cetera, and finally Schoenberg’s serialism, already a “historic” fact of some thirty years when Stravinsky took it over. “Whatever interests me, whatever I love, I wish to make my own (I am probably describing a rare form of kleptomania).

The Concerto was begun in the summer of 1923 and completed the following April. Koussevitzky, who had commissioned it, suggested that Stravinsky play the piano part himself. “I hesitated at first, fearing that I should not have time to perfect my technique as a pianist, to practice enough, and to acquire the endurance necessary to execute a work demanding sustained effort . . . I began, therefore the loosening of my fingers by playing a lot of Czerny exercises . . .”

This stood him in good stead, for in the following years he composed for his own use the Sonata, the Serenade, the Capriccio, the Stravinsky-Dushkin arrangements, the Duo concertant, and the Concerto for Two Solo Pianos. As for the Concerto, he performed it “no fewer than forty times.”

The Koussevitzky performance took place at the Paris Opera on 22 May 1924. Stravinsky suffered a lapse of memory at the beginning of the slow movement. “I said so quietly to Koussevitzky, who glanced at the score and hummed the first notes. That was enough to restore my balance and enable me to attack the Largo.” He suffered memory losses on at least two other occasions with the Concerto, once when he was “suddenly obsessed by the idea that the audience was a collection of dolls in a huge panopticon,” and again because “I suddenly noticed the reflection of my fingers in the glossy wood at the edge of the keyboard.”

The music begins in the style of the French overture, with slow dotted rhythms, and then shifts into an allegro at once forceful, brilliant, and percussive. The slow movement is noble, eloquent, dignified, and very rich in detail; its form is tripartite, with piano cadenzas at either end of the middle section. The finale is lively and robust; it presents a number of ideas one after another; the unifying factors being references, some explicit and some implied, to first movement materials. The coda returns to the slow introduction and then finishes with a brief, brilliant Vivo.